Every hero’s journey must go through a dark chapter to prevail. There must be adversity, a gauntlet that must be ran through.
If you’re in the middle of the slog or the dip or the darkest moment of your life, this is the way. You’re a hero and you have the ability to overcome.
Peaking behind the curtain to see what it takes to pull off a magic trick, sure there will be disappointment.
If you knew what I knew, would you act differently?
If the answer is Yes, then the customer is not informed.
Look, we all know magic is not real but it doesn’t mean we don’t want to believe in it.
Real power means real responisbility.
Many of us are beginning to go back to the office for the first time.
Considering the average commute time of 26 minutes, that is 52 minutes a day that you will now need to fit back in your schedule.
How?
Up to this point, it is almost certain that you have been “too busy” to do honey-do projects, or to take your kids on that special day trip or to start that book you always wanted write.
“Not enough time” is a myth. A story we tell ourselves about staying busy, all the while remaining not as productive as we could be.
A month ago, adding almost an hour to be in your car seemed unreasonable and now you will do it.
Because we make time what we prioritize.
What is it?
What is the self?
Is it my thoughts? Emotions?
Is it what decisions I make or the things I do?
We have to be clear:
Who we are isn’t what we do.
But what we do can change who we are.
We make mistakes that doesn’t make us a mistake.
And sometimes, we do something great and daring and it changes the very person we are to become.
We treat our identity and ideology as fixed. Something that rarely changes. But our identity is much more plastic than we give it credit for.
In the last 200 years, we are the first humans ever to go shopping for fun.
Before, shopping was stressful. When you bought something, you had to be sure it was used. If bought eggs and broke them, someone might go hungry at home.
Take a look at a list of other firsts in the last 200 years:
And on, and on, and on. Contrast through the first 200,000 years of human history. And you have the painfully slow process of domestication of food and animals. With a more sedentary lifestyle, populations grow (and with it more food and animals). And now, with a population sitting around, you have the development of technologies. Trade develops and you see an evolution of germs.
Most of us have a hard time grasping what it means to grow a population from 320 million people in the 17th century to 1 billion in the 18th to 7 billion of today. The ratchet of capitalism: from moving to hunters to the fields to factories to skyscrapers to uncertainty and the internet, the network effect and globalization that ties us all together.
Those decisions people made over the last several centuries have held so much more significance than we realize. Our lives are so unrecognizable from previous generations, we forget that while change is scary, we also never want to go back to the way things used to be either.
Stepping onto an escalator, you don’t step for the stair that is present. No, you step for the stair that is coming.
Once you recognize a pattern, it’s easier to predict the future.
As a result, we spend a lot of time looking for patterns. We look for what is out of place and it turns out, it has kept us alive for so long. If I hear a stick break and can predict that is a sabertooth tiger, I have a better chance to survive.
These types of decisions cause all sorts of problems.
For one, we don’t have to run from sabertooth tigers anymore, even though our brain thinks we do. Humans are also story-telling creatures. That we can create meaning out of the meaningless while ignoring statistics and probabilities and chance.
There is a theory that if you knew all the information in the universe you could predict the future. It’s safe to say, we are no where close to knowing what happens next.
The bottom line, life is more complicated than an escalator. We like to think we are good lie detectors, that we can sense things about to happen. A “spidey sense” or gut feeling. Any veteran Vegas player knows that this isn’t true. Because we are not just trying to predict what is happening in our environment, but we are also trying to understand our own thought patterns, our shortcuts and heuristics. Trying to recognize someone else’s is impossible. We sometimes just guess right but much like playing roulette, someone sometimes wins.
Only you have seen every blog post, listened to every demo, written every email…
You’ve seen all the good and all the bad. The unexpected and surprising.
Because we know our weaknesses and insecurities, the Resistance shows up to point out everyone else’s work. All of the 5-star reviews, the stuff that went viral, the likes on Facebook, the New York Time’s Best Sellers…
And we are left looking at our work that falls short to the measuring stick of popularity.
It’s easy to compare our worst with everyone else’s best. And it’s easy to feed the narrative of, “I’m not good enough.”
If your work is good enough to resonate with at least one person, chances are it can change others.
Remember, Leonard Cohen was a failed writer before he started his music career at 33. Starting always feel like we are behind. Popularity isn’t necessarily a signal if the work is good.
The internet has made it easier than ever before to find out if a movie or book will be “good”. I say “good” but what I really mean is something that fits the recipient’s taste.
With a couple of clicks anyone can voice their opinion. Every time we click something, we are casting an upvote for Google. You have Amazon reviews, Rotten Tomatoes and endless streams of blogs full of commentary.
Essentially, everyone is a critic. Because of that, we need to establish rules what is okay and what is not. Especially when hiding behind a user name. Amenity emboldens passive aggressive behavior.
As a rule for the viewer, comment on the work not the artist. The artist has painstakingly made something for you that they hope will change you. If it misstepped, that’s the work that failed to resonate with you. Because it might resonate with someone else and perhaps you weren’t the target audience who the artist was seeking to change.
Artists, don’t make criticisms about you. You know what this labor of love cost. And sometimes the work doesn’t make the impact you hoped it would. No author got better because they read all their one-star reviews.
There’s a difference between picking the work apart and picking the artist apart. Keep it civil and in the right perspective.
There is a point when crossing into a black hole that once you pass it you can’t come back.
It’s the point of no return.
We treat decisions the same type of way. But that isn’t true. Our lives are not black holes.
There are many choices and endless possibilities.
Just because you committed to one path doesn’t mean you choose another.
When you step back a bit, you will begin to see the degrees of freedom that you have. It’s when our vision becomes too narrow that we can’t see what’s around us.
Please sit down. Use your number 2 pencil. And ask if you want permission to go to the bathroom.
We have had 20 plus years of indoctrination. Of being told that this was the blue print of happiness.
Put your head down, do as you are told, and we will pay you. And it worked for a short time. You got a pension. You had a house.
So the lie continues until…
Until there is no social mobility. Until debts systems grow so far out of control that you can’t get out of them. Because we have been trained to be told what to do, we continue to follow the step-by-step set of instructions are parents (or boss or teachers) told us to do.
Work harder.
There is an oversupply of those willing to be told what to do next.
We must understand the other part of the lie that many are told:
“You need us.”
We need capitalism (big business) to provide us jobs, healthcare, vacation, safety, security, abundance, and yes, fulfillment.
But none of that is true. Because finding humanity and authenticity and joy, all things that each of us profess to want to find, can’t be found in the stuff that is sold to us. Capitalism is the perfect system to produce average stuff for average people. It is perfect for producing for the masses. But what it can’t do is bring the happiness we seek.
That fulfillment requires none of obedience or compliance. It’s about embracing risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure. It’s about throwing away the map and carving a new path. It is about vulnerability and sharing your art. It’s about solving interesting, complex problems. It’s about commitment to see something through that has a higher probability of failing.
Capitalism continues to find someone who is faster and cheaper. What happens when a car can drive from Cleveland to LA without any pitstops. A driver that makes fewer mistakes and doesn’t demand dental coverage.
Over the next several decades, we have to ask what it means to be human. Because it isn’t defined by a paycheck. And it is more than your job. We can’t be told the answer because this is a new chapter in history. Instead, we can embrace the unknown and take a step.
